Mind/Consciousness

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Mind.

C. S. Lewis:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a bye-product, the sensation I call thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk-jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

(C. S. Lewis, Broadcast Talks, [London: Geoffrey Bles; The Centenary Press, 1943], Part II: What Christians Believe, §. I, pp. 36-37.)

C. S. Lewis:

     I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer”. The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonizing it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of the primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the night mare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

(C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” In: C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast: And Other Pieces, [London: Fontana Books, 1965], pp. 57-58.)

Thomas C. Oden:

     The emergence of mind in evolutionary history requires the hypothesis that God exists. The pervasive presence of intelligibility in the evolving world and in our minds requires the premise of God. There cannot be a universe without a Universal Mind that in some ways corresponds with our own finite minds (cf. C. S. Pierce, Collected Papers VI, pp. 345 ff.; F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theol. Il, chap. IV, pp. 79 ff.; H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 60 ff.; Calvin, Inst. 1.5; 1.14 ff.). The argument from mind differs from the arguments from order or design in that they use largely inanimate or animal metaphors (arrows, clocks, animal adaptation), whereas the argument from mind proceeds from the empirical observation of emerging intelligence in history and natural-historical development, especially human mind.

     This argument begins with the remarkable fact that intelligent consciousness undeniably exists in the world. Not only is the world itself intelligible, but also our minds are capable of grasping that intelligibility. That we live in an intelligible world is a fact that is absolutely necessary to any language or discourse whatever. The premise of intelligibility is a necessary precondition of our minds’ even thinking about this question or any other (cf. Clement of Alex., Strom. V.13, ANF II, pp. 465 ff.; Calvin, Inst. 1.3). That intelligence exists to apprehend that intelligibility is itself the most astonishing fact of natural history’s development.

(Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology: Volume One: The Living God, [Peabody: Prince Press, 2001], p. 147.)

C. S. Lewis:

     Perhaps this may be even more simply put in another way. Every particular thought (whether it is a judgment of fact or a judgment of value) is always and by all men discounted the moment they believe that it can be explained, without remainder, as the result of irrational causes. Whenever you know what the other man is saying is wholly due to his complexes or to a bit of bone pressing on his brain, you cease to attach any importance to it. But if naturalism were true, then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, naturalism is worthless. If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.

(C. S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970], p. 137.)

Barry Stroud:

     I can illustrate it by starting with an extreme naturalist view. I would say that it is a ridiculously extreme position, were it not for the fact that many philosophers I respect appear to hold it. It says that the natural world is exhausted by all the physical facts. That is all and only what the natural world amounts to on this view; there is nothing else in nature. First of all, this view is probably not itself reached by purely naturalistic means. It not only states all the physical facts, which presumably can be determined by broadly naturalistic means. But it goes on to say that those are all the facts there are—that they are the whole truth about the world. And that claim is more than the conjunction of all the physical facts. It excludes everything else from being true, as they alone do not. Is the exhaustiveness that is essential to physicalism something that is naturalistically or physicalistically arrived at? That is one question.

     Second, a natural world conceived of only as the totality of all the physical facts obviously does not contain any psychological facts. There are no truths to the effect that someone believes, knows, feels, wants, prefers, or values anything. Of course, anyone who holds that the physical is all there is might hold that everything we think along those lines is really just physical facts in disguise. In any case, that would leave no psychological facts for a naturalistic theory of the world to explain. The study of human beings on such a restricted physicalist conception would be just a study of physical goings-on, including some that happen to go on in human organisms.

     The case is extreme because it does not include very much for a study of human beings to explain. Without at least biological facts in your naturalistic conception of the world you will not have much to investigate that is distinctively or interestingly human. But if the physicalist conception is expanded to include biological facts as well, what exactly are such facts thought to add? Do biological facts include the “intentional” facts of human beings believing, knowing, feeling, wanting, preferring, and valuing certain things? Some would say not, since these are just “folk” ways of speaking. Organisms inhabiting the natural world are not be thought of as having any such attitudes, or as acting from them, on that view. That would mean that naturalism could never be faced with the problem of explaining how and why human beings come to believe and feel and want the things they do. There would be no such facts. Naturalism as to what is so would be so restrictive as to leave naturalism as a method of investigation with much less to do.

     There is an embarrassing absurdity in this position which is revealed as soon as the naturalist reflects and acknowledges that he believes his naturalistic theory of the world. If persons with attitudes like belief and knowledge are not really part of nature, he cannot consistently say that about himself. I mean he cannot say it and consistently regard what he is saying as true. In fact he cannot say anything and regard it as true, or think of himself as saying it, if he holds such a restricted naturalistic conception.

(Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism;” In: Barry Stroud, Philosophers Past and Present: Selected Essays, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011], pp. 230-231.) Preview.

David C. Downing:

     Besides his reading, Lewis’s new acquaintances at Oxford after the war helped contribute to his spiritual healing, a gradual moving away from his sense that the physical world was “wholly diabolical & malevolent.” In 1919 he met Owen Barfield, whom he would later call “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” It was Barfield who first brought home to Lewis the problem with any philosophy that saw the physical world as “rock-bottom reality.” If one believes that human thought is merely an expression of neural activity, an evolutionary survival tool, then how can one have any confidence in that thought itself? If we are to assume that abstract thinking provides valid insights about external reality, then we cannot be strict empiricists, believing that all truth is ultimately derived from sense impressions of the physical world.

(David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004], p. 94.) Preview. 

C. S. Lewis:

     If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents — the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts — i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy — are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.

(C. S. Lewis, “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” Q. 6; In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970], pp. 52-53.)

Denis O. Lamoureux:

…the belief that truth is only found through scientific investigation. This view of knowledge is known as positivism reductionism. It asserts that all phenomena, including religious experience, can be reduced by science into nothing but simple physical laws. Ironically, atheists fail to recognize that there is no scientific test or experiment to prove this claim. They put their faith in the methods of science in a way similar to religious people who embrace belief in God. But even more troubling is the fact that this view of origins trusts the human brain, an organ that supposedly evolved merely by blind chance and that was never intended to discover truth. In a dysteleological world, the brain would have arisen for the sole purposes of fighting, fleeing, feeding, and “fertilizing.” But how can an organ fashioned by irrational processes make true statements about ultimate reality? Why should atheists believe in such claims worked out in their brain? It is clear that dysteleological belief is contradictory and self-referentially incoherent.

(Denis O. Lamoureux, I love Jesus & I Accept Evolution, [Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009], pp. 36-37.)

James W. Sire:

…could a being whose origins were so “iffy” trust his or her own capacity to know? Put it personally: If my mind is conterminous with my brain, if “I” am only a thinking machine, how can I trust my thought? If consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, perhaps the appearance of human freedom which lays the basis for morality is an epiphenomenon of either chance or inexorable law. Perhaps chance or the nature of things only built into me the “feeling” that I am free but actually I am not.

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], p. 93.)

James W. Sire:

     Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions. The only beings in the universe who care about such matters are humans. But people are bound to their bodies. Their consciousness arises from a complex interrelation of highly “ordered” matter. Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality? Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.

     For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God—deceiving or nondeceiving, perfect or imperfect, personal or impersonal. There is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers. They “arose,” but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

     Charles Darwin himself once said, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted.

     Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true.

     C. S. Lewis puts the case this way:

If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.

     What we need for such certainty is the existence of some “Rational Spirit” outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], pp. 103-104.)

James W. Sire:

     Virtually no one is a full-fledged epistemological nihilist. Yet naturalism does not allow a person to have any solid reason for confidence in human reason. We thus end in an ironic paradox. Naturalism, born in the Age of Enlightenment, was launched on a firm acceptance of the human ability to know. Now naturalists find that they can place no confidence in their knowing.

     The whole point of this argument can be summarized briefly: Naturalism places us as human beings in a box. But for us to have any confidence that our knowledge that we are in a box is true, we need to stand outside the box or to have some other being outside the box provide us with information (theologians call this “revelation”). But there is nothing or no one outside the box to give us revelation, and we cannot ourselves transcend the box. Ergo: epistemological nihilism.

     A naturalist who fails to perceive this is like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never—”

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.

     In the naturalistic framework, people pursue a knowledge that forever recedes before them. We can never know.

(James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog: Fifth Edition, [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009], p. 106.)

C. S. Lewis:

If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. It can be trusted only if quite a different Metaphysic is true. If the deepest thing in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves—if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It—then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature’s Creator and ours. The disorderly world which we cannot endure to believe in is the disorderly world He would not have endured to create. Our conviction that the time-table will not be perpetually or meaninglessly altered is sound because we have (in a sense) eavesdropped in the Masters’ common-room.

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Collier Books, 1978], XIII: On Probability, p. 105.)

Charles Darwin:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

(Charles Darwin, Letter [C. Darwin to W. Graham, Down, July 3rd, 1881]; In: The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter: In Two Volumes: Vol. I, ed. Francis Darwin, [New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887], p. 285.)

C. S. Lewis:

     Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” (Possible Worlds, p. 209.)

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Collier Books, 1978], III: The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism, p. 15.)

J. B. S. Haldane:

     For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

(J. B. S. Haldane, “When I am Dead;” In: J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds: And Other Essays, [London: Chatto and Windus, 1930], p. 209.)

Cf. Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003]. Preview.

C. S. Lewis:

It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t, all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Collier Books, 1978], IV: Nature and Supernature, p. 28.)

J. P. Moreland:

     In fact, the existence of finite minds can be used as evidence for the existence of God. If we grant what Churchland implicitly acknowledges, namely, that there is no scientific explanation for the origin of mind, including no evolutionary explanation, then if scientific and theistic explanations are the best live alternatives, we can explain the origin of finite minds best by appealing to a Divine Mind as its most adequate cause. If we limit the alternatives to what are live options for most people in Western culture, “in the beginning” were either the particles or the Logos (Mind). It is easier to see how finite mind could come from a universe created by a Mind than it is to see how mind could come from non-rational particles.

(J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, [Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014], p. 95.)

Thomas Nagel (Atheist Philosopher):

Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself. I will have more to say about these problems of reductionism later; here let me sketch them briefly.

     Inevitably, when we construct a naturalistic external self-understanding, we are relying on one part of our “sense-making” capacities to create a system that will make sense of the rest. We rely on evolutionary theory to analyze and evaluate everything from our logical and probabilistic cognition to our moral sense. This reflects the view that empirical science is the one secure, privileged form of understanding and that we can trust other forms only to the extent that they can be validated through a scientific account of how and why they work. That still requires reliance on some of our own faculties. But some faculties are thought to merit more confidence than others, and even if we cannot provide them with a noncircular external justification, we must at least believe that they are not undermined by the external account of their sources and operation that is being proposed. A core of cognitive confidence must remain intact, even if some other faculties are rendered doubtful by their evolutionary pedigree.

     Structurally, it is still the Cartesian ideal, but with the leading role played by evolutionary theory instead of by an a priori demonstration of divine benevolence. But I agree with Alvin Plantinga that, unlike divine benevolence, the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole. I think the evolutionary hypothesis would imply that though our cognitive capacities could be reliable, we do not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have in using them directly—as we do in science. In particular, it does not explain why we are justified in relying on them to correct other cognitive dispositions that lead us astray, though they may be equally natural, and equally susceptible to evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. This is even more clearly true of our moral and other normative capacities—on which we often rely to correct our instincts. I agree with Sharon Street that an evolutionary self-understanding would almost certainly require us to give up moral realism—the natural conviction that our moral judgments are true or false independent of our beliefs. Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.

(Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], pp. 27-28.)

For more on this see: Alvin Plantinga, Warrant And Proper Function, [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], pp. 216ff. See also: archive.com

See also: C. S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970], pp. 136-138.

Consciousness.

J. P. Moreland:

Start with matter and tweak it physically and all you will get is tweaked matter. There is no need or room for mind and consciousness to enter the picture. However, if you begin with God, then Mind is the fundamental reality (not matter) and its appearance in cosmic history is not the ontological problem it is for the scientific naturalist.

(J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, [Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014], p. 76.)

J. P. Moreland: 

Here’s the point: You Can’t Get Something From Nothing . . . It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry. …How, then, do you get something totally different—conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures—from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem. 

     If you apply a physical process to physical matter, you’re going to get a different arrangement of physical materials. For example, if you apply the physical process of heating to a bowl of water, you’re going to get a new product—steam—which is just a more complicated form of water, but it’s still physical. And if the history of the universe is just a story of physical processes being applied to physical materials, you’d end up with increasingly complicated arrangements of physical materials, but you’re not going to get something that’s completely nonphysical. That is a jump of a totally different kind. 

     At the end of the day, as Phillip Johnson put it, you either have ‘In the beginning were the particles,’ or ‘In the beginning was the Logos,’ which means ‘divine mind.’ If you start with particles, and the history of the universe is just a story about the rearrangement of particles, you may end up with a more complicated arrangement of particles, but you’re still going to have particles. You’re not going to have minds or consciousness. 

     However—and this is really important—if you begin with an infinite mind, then you can explain how finite minds could come into existence. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense—and which many atheistic evolutionists are conceding—is the idea of getting a mind . . . into existence by starting with brute, dead, mindless matter. That’s why some of them are trying to get rid of consciousness by saying it’s not real and that we’re just computers. …However, that’s a pretty difficult position to maintain while you’re conscious!

(J. P. Moreland, “The Evidence of Consciousness: The Enigma of the Mind: An Interview with J. P. Moreland;” In: Lee Strobel, The Case For A Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004], pp. 263-264.) Preview.

Thomas Nagel (Atheist Philosopher):

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.

(Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], p. 35.) Preview. 

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria